Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section. Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war. Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language. https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one. https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts. https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel. https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator. https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps. https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language. https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language. https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses. https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
still no viable alternatives to Twitter, so I think it's just another straw on the camel's back and not the final one. definitely fucked long-term but the monopoly it possesses will shield it from the natural decay cycle for longer than would be usual in a more genuinely free market situation and its use as a propaganda dissemination device for America will also prop it up
a website isn't dying when a substantial portion of its activity (and thus profit) comes from people saying that the website is screwed and dead; it's dying when nobody even cares to post that it's dying anymore and are all somewhere else, posting shitty memes or whatever the average person does on social media
I agree and guess it wouldn't die immediatly because of that, but a platform like twitter needs to attract new users constantly (assuming it is still mostly finances vie ads/user data). And putting a paywall to basic functionality that used to be free will deter most from joining. That will lead to decreasing user numbers over time.
Bluesky is currently at 5.3 million users and climbing, while Twitter is at 335 million monthly active users and falling. difficult to extrapolate given that Twitter's userbase has only been falling since 2022 but a back-of-the-envelope calculation assuming a linear downfall says that Twitter will reach 0 users in about 20 years. This almost certainly won't happen; sudden events will probably cause periodic exoduses that then form a positive feedback loop of having less content to look at on Twitter and more content on other websites. My personal inkling is that the crossover point between Twitter and Bluesky will be in 2030, give or take a couple years
I'm just glad I signed up on there early enough to get my first name as a handle. there's like 2 other people in the world who share my name and they got the gmail and twitter username first. and my gmail account is from 2008!
I actually completely forgot about Threads, I hear about it even less than Bluesky despite it having a much larger userbase. Is there a big overlap between them and Twitter's audiences?
It still exist and has open registration now, its still small and dominated by libs, i think it will continue growing while twitter slowly dies under musk
You wouldn't happen to have a computer in your pocket that's several million times more powerful than the one used to go to the moon, would you? And several more on stage with you? I know it can legitimately be difficult to multiply or divide by two in front of an audience, but, ah...there ARE things that can do that for you.... I mean hell, one of your big schticks (as shown by the themes of this very performance) is actually worshiping those things, so....
Not to mention you can and really should just ditch the "math" and do a performance that doesn't depend on it after like the fifth fuck up.
Very billionaire-white-girl-other-people-do-everything-for-me vibes.